I have written before about Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945), a British aristocrat of the first half of the twentieth century. She was also of course an author who had one story, "Satan's Circus," in Weird Tales (Oct. 1931). Lady Eleanor wrote more than a dozen books, mostly about dancers, circuses, and Gypsies. As with so many highborn or elite kind of people, she seems to have been attracted to the low life. I'm sure that in the opinion of some, there isn't much in culture lower than pulp magazines. If there is, comic books are probably it. So imagine coming across Lady Eleanor Smith's name in that lowly form:
The story shown above is from Ripley's Believe It or Not! True Ghost Stories #11, published by Gold Key (Western Publishing Company) in November 1968. I found my copy of this comic book at a mini-comic con in Nitro, West Virginia, in May of this year. It was the first comic con I have gone to this year. After more than a year of the not-normal, things are getting back to the way they used to be, or as much as is possible in our current situation. Here's to more comic conventions, get-togethers, parties, celebrations, and on and on, and no return at all to the coronavirus regime established the world over in 2020-2021.
Update (Feb. 1, 2022): I have found another account of the scene described by the anonymous author in Ripley's Believe It or Not! True Ghost Stories. This one is from the book Impossible Yet It Happened! by R. DeWitt Miller (Ace Books, n.d., pp. 48-49). And Miller gave an original source, Lady Eleanor Smith's own book, Life's a Circus (1939). I wonder if there could be other weird tales hiding in the pages of that book.
Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
No comments:
Post a Comment